Re: Wordpress Port

On Tuesday 08 December 2009 12:36:01 am Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
> [Warning: no Ruby content whatsoever.]

Nice disclaimer!

> Generally so.  But Perl is awful for writing Web applications.

How so?

Because I'd definitely disagree here. I think Perl is generally useful -- and 
I think Ruby is also generally useful. I just think Ruby is prettier and much 
easier to work with than Perl.

> > Second, just look at the number of global functions in PHP. I'm not
> > talking
> > about the ones you'll write yourself, but the ones that are built into
> > the
> > language. Even Perl is better about this, and Javascript certainly is.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand your point.  PHP was obviously designed
> primarily as a procedural language, so it's sort of appropriate for
> there to be lots of global functions.

Even supposing it was... Erlang is designed as a pseudo-functional language, 
and it still has the concept of namespaces. I realize PHP has namespaces, but 
I wasn't seeing them actually used, and there's still a bunch of cruft that 
seems to be from before PHP realized namespaces were a good idea.

> Everything I ever did in PHP used the Pear DB or
> MDB2 library, both of which support prepared statements.  I learned that
> trick back in my ColdFusion days, and wouldn't have given it up in PHP.

I'll grant this point -- I guess it had to be solved at some point.

> > So the language itself doesn't lend itself to particularly high quality
> > in the
> > first place.
> 
> WTF?  Just because the standard DB library has problems, you make this
> sweeping conclusion?  Isn't that kind of like concluding that Ruby sucks
> because TMail and REXML are awkward?

I actually kind of like TMail, though REXML has been improved on.

No, the point is that in a default PHP setup, there's tons of this stuff. 
Again, from the global function count alone... It wouldn't be so bad if there 
was some kind of convention to them, but there isn't.

There was a much better thought out rant against PHP, by a Perl guy, who made 
this point very well:

http://www.tnx.nl/php.html

To summarize it:

 - Arguments and return values are extremely inconsistent. That's with 
standard PHP libraries.
 - PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations -- and these are 
inconsistently named. (Contrast to Ruby, where I can add /i to a regex, or I 
can just downcase the string.)
 - Continuing on that theme, functions are inconsistently named.
 - Scoping. Seriously.
 - Too many functions.

Wow, I'd forgotten most of the reasons I hate PHP!

For what it's worth, though, the "modularity" section may not apply -- PEAR 
may have solved that.

He updates it for php5 here:

http://www.tnx.nl/php5.html

This didn't really fix anything in the above list, but added classes, so he 
criticizes the PHP object model. But then, you agreed that the object model 
wasn't that good, so I won't care.

It did, however, add exceptions. But since they were added after the fact, 
they're probably about as useful as they are in Perl. In Ruby, nothing (except 
ActiveRecord, apparently) ever just returns an error, it raises an exception 
if something's wrong. This means no silent errors. Noisy errors are a Good 
Thing.

In Perl, while there is a strange way to deal with exceptions, nothing uses 
them. Perl objects tend to return a false value when something goes wrong.

> > I mean, think of the design of it, too. The syntax alone, the fact that
> > every
> > file is essentially already a template -- this was never intended to be
> > a
> > general-purpose language. It was intended to be a template language. It
> > doesn't even make a very good template language -- Haml is better, even
> > if you
> > don't consider the fact that it's tied to Ruby.
> 
> Yeah, PHP started as a template language, and it shows.  But you don't
> have to use it that way.  It's possible -- and recommended -- to write
> entire PHP files without any HTML in them.

I realize this. My point is that many of the design decisions of a template 
language -- very simple syntax, just sprinkle some global functions, the 
assumption that no one will ever write anything huge in this -- all of this 
leaves a lot to be desired when you want to use it for something else.

Perl started out as a report language, but it's at least extracted the 
"format" concept into a separate module.

To make it even more perverse, even PHP people tend to use other template 
languages (like Liquid) instead of PHP, to do their templating in PHP. This is 
profoundly ironic to me. I suppose next thing you know, Liquid will become 
Turing-complete, people will be writing Liquid apps, and we'll need a 
safe/better template language for Liquid?

> > People who learn PHP usually start as designers, who learn a
> > bit
> > of HTML and CSS, and need a tiny bit of server-side logic in their HTML
> > page,
> > so they learn a bit of PHP or paste a bit of code in...
> 
> You could say the same about JavaScript -- people learn to write a line
> or two at a time, so they never really learn to use the language.  Both
> JavaScript and PHP are pretty good languages if you allow them to be
> rather than considering them extensions of HTML.

Oh, I agree. And just because some people learn Rails because it's easy, and 
never bother to learn Ruby the language, isn't really a point against Ruby or 
Rails. But then...

Javascript is a FAR better language than PHP.

Javascript has first-class functions (which are also closures), a decent 
object system including prototypal inheritance, and the unification of objects 
and hashes (combined with that prototypal inheritance) means you can build 
your own inheritance system, or use classical inheritance...

It could almost be called multi-paradigm.

Frankly, the only reason I use Ruby instead of Javascript (where I do) is I 
like Ruby syntax better, and Ruby actually has bindings to native stuff I can 
use (there's no Javascript filesystem API that I know of). I mean, with v8, 
Javascript is even _faster_ than Ruby.

So, scratch the surface of Javascript, and it becomes a truly elegant 
language. A lisp in disguise.

Scratch the surface of PHP, and it's... more PHP. The next step in the 
evolution of a PHP coder is probably to learn another language.

> > For that matter, I'd guess the better developers would see that there
> > are
> > better languages, and would migrate away from PHP, in the long run.
> 
> That's what happened to me -- but it wasn't PHP's language features that
> did it.  It was the fact that TDD was more feasible in Rails than in any
> PHP framework I could find.

Now look at BDD, and at rspec. Or maybe rake.

Can you imagine building anything like that in PHP?

> > Maybe things have changed
> > since I
> > last used it.
> 
> Maybe you never really learned what you could do with it -- as witness
> your ignorance of DB library options.

Probably -- I was mostly working with Wordpress and Drupal.

> > Good for you. Hey, I've seen Drupal. I was amazed -- there are things I
> > strongly dislike about it, but here was object-orientation, modules,
> > mixins,
> > all kinds of good stuff. Sure, it was completely hacked together, and
> > not at
> > all supported by the standard, but it was decent.
> 
> That must have been Drupal 6.  Drupal 5 was horrible -- basically
> reinventing OO in a fragile procedural way.

It actually might have been Drupal 5.

> Drupal 6 was a complete rewrite, and I believe it does use PHP OO.

Yeah, so it would've been Drupal 5 that I was using.

> VB is brain-dead.  PHP is not, at least if you don't try to use its OO
> features to any great extent.

Or its reflection. Or the features it doesn't have...

> I'm sorry, but it's obvious that you don't know what you're talking
> about with respect to PHP.

I have a feeling I should be glad of that.

But just a quick test to see if it's worth learning more again:

Does PHP have closures yet? Or even anonymous functions?


I'll give you this: Languages evolve. It's possible I don't know what I'm 
talking about. It's possible the tnx.nl guy no longer knows what he's talking 
about. It's possible that PHP will one day evolve into a beautiful language, 
or at least a decent one, leaving me only able to grumble about syntax and 
snipe at the <? at the top of each file.

On the other hand, from what I _do_ know of PHP, I can still name four or five 
better languages off the top of my head. Why would we want to evolve PHP into 
a good language when we have so many good languages already?